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Routes are here!

How many times have you wished for a tool to help you plan an epic group ride or share a favorite run with friends from out of town? We’ve all dreamed of this tool for a long time. Today, we’re very excited to announce Routes on Strava.

Not Your Average Route Builder
When we set out to create our own routing tool, we knew we needed to do it differently than everyone else. Our tool needed to be smarter and be built specifically for runners and cyclists.

The heart of the new Routes feature is the Route Builder. The power behind this tool is the use of real athlete data, which helps recommend the best roads and trails around the world that runners and cyclists use most often. It does this by tallying the “votes” cast by runners and cyclists each time they hit the roads and trails. Nearly 30 billion GPS points were used to now enable people to ride and run like the locals do, wherever they are.

With Route Builder, you can create running or cycling routes that fit your preferences, like routes that use Strava popularity, or a route that minimizes elevation.

Route Builder Available First to Premium Members
Premium members, we’re excited to preview this exciting new feature to you. Be the first to create routes, try the route creation preference tools, and share your routes with friends and followers. With your usage and data, we can make Routes even more robust and intelligent. In the coming weeks, access to Route Builder will be available to all users, but we’re enabling it first for our Premium members.

Share, Export or Print Out Your Route
Access the Route Builder by clicking the “My Routes” tab which will appear on your Dashboard. On the My Routes page, you’ll have access to all the routes you’ve both created and starred.

Once you’ve created a route, share it with your friends on Facebook, via email, or with your followers on Strava. You can also export a route to compatible GPS devices so you can navigate a new route you’ve created. If you don’t have a GPS device, we’ve also provided handy printer-friendly cue sheets that you can print out and share. They fold up neatly to be stowed away in a jersey pocket or jacket.

Strava Routes is in BETA
There’s so much more we’d like to do with Routes on Strava. For example, we’ll soon be adding a Strava popularity heat map so you can visualize where Strava athletes run and ride.

Over time, we’ll be improving our maps in order to make routing better and better. Sometimes you’ll find that the Route Builder’s maps are missing trail or road data and you won’t be able to create the route you want. This will continue to improve, but we want to hear from you when you’re having trouble. We’ve built an error reporting tool into the Route Builder so you can share information with us when things don’t go as expected.

This is just the beginning for Strava Routes. We’re eager to hear what you think and, as always, we’re listening to you feedback.

More on Strava

Would be good to be able to log an activity based on a route… like for when Strava crashes 3 times in a row but you know the route you ran and how fast

Eric Schapp

Would be nice to be able to upload the route i just created so i can follow it on my phone-hint hint…

Elsubstar

Having to use a third party app to navigate is a bit of a pain. If we could follow our routes on our phones as well as record it, all in Strava, that would way cool! Everything in one place. Tidy.

David Rossi

This! I would love to be able to use a spare phone attached to my handlebars to find and navigate mountain bike trails. I love finding new trails but they often have forks which lead in opposite directions. To be able to set a route and quickly glance down at Strava running on my handlebars to navigate it would be awesome.

aleena rose

Hey to everyone, it’s my first visit of the blog site; this blog includes awesome and actually best info for the visitors.http://trekasie.com/en

Maarten de Bekker

First impression of the planner is very good. Sugeestions for improvement:
* Add more maps like OSM and OSMCycle maps
* Feature to upload existing routes

http://maltehempel.de/ Malte

In my case the card is not moved during driving. Must therefore always manually move the route.

Max Gray

The only problem I’ve had is that the route planner doesn’t recognise cycle routes that are off the road network (in East Anglia, at least)

NIck

Suggestion would be to include a way to organize routes, instead of just listing them in order of creation. A competing service, Map My Ride, has this built in and makes it a much more useful service. Fix this strava, and you’ve got my business!

Kkuja

Please, make a possibility to export route from exercise data. Also It would be nice to be able to browse routes other have made (to find new routes). Currently route planner is not very usefull to me, because I like to run in more rural places (less existing data), and it seems that maps about my region (Central Finland) are not very exact.

P.S. Why can’t we comment these blog posts from our strava acccounts?

Android6000

Viewing route on phone — Suggested Improvement:
First let me commend you on adding the Route feature; very nice to have it in Strava instead of having to use Google Maps and run a separate program on the phone to view it. However, when viewing the route during a ride this week I found that although the route view gave a nice overview of my planned 23 mile route, using it to find my next turn was quite arduous: I was forced to stop my bike and go through the long process of zooming, recentering the map, and zooming in again in order to view the street name of my next turn — this was with a 5.2″x4″ Amoled screen in maximum brightness (which is bigger than a standard IPhone screen). What I think would be valuable would be having a toggle switch in the bottom right hand corner of the route view that would switch it from a route/map view to a cue sheet view in nice large letters, thus allowing a rider to much more quickly and easily find his/her next turn.
As a side note, although Strava gave me the option to print a cue sheet when I created the route, a built-in toggle to view a cue sheet on the phone is preferable for me since I have my phone in clear view mounted on my top-tube and always running the Strava App while cycling. I have to imagine that you have plenty of users who would also like this capability.

Keeping my fingers crossed that this is something you plan on adding to your next major release.